Inside the Mind of the World's Most Powerful Liberal Blogger

June 24. 2006

Page 3 of 24

MOULITSAS: It's very divided. I was a Howard Dean person. But the site, I mean, you know, I have contributing editors that help out on the site, and I had one guy who was a Gephardt supporter and another guy who was a big Wes Clark supporter. I think the networks at large [were] very much divided between the Howard Dean faction and the Wesley Clark faction.

So there's no -- there's no -- it's hard to say, you know, this is the blogosphere guy. And I think we're going to see that in 2008. There's not going to be any real consensus for any candidate. Maybe if Al Gore entered the race, we might have a consensus.

TAPPER: Do you, Markos, endorse candidates?

MOULITSAS: What I did last cycle, and I haven't done it this cycle, is I picked 15 races, not top-tier races. What I wanted to do is say, 'OK, the Democratic party has millions of dollars that is going to take to win these battleground front-line districts, and the Republicans are going to dump millions of dollars. If I raise $50,000 for a race, it doesn't really mean that much if a race costs $5 million to run, right?' What we wanted to do was expand the playing field and put pressure on lower-tier Republicans.

We targeted Tom DeLay in Texas. People laughed at us, and DeLay actually won with 51 percent of the vote. I mean, we -- 55 percent of the vote. It was a tight race, and it kind of showed that, well, this guy is actually vulnerable. He's not this big, powerful invulnerable person we thought he was. I don't think people would've known that had we not pumped in some money and some attention to Richard Morris, his opponent's race, in 2004.

So what we're trying to do is pin down these Republicans. Tom DeLay had never opened up a district office in an election since he first got elected in the '80s. He was forced to open district offices in 2004. So that's the sort of thing we're trying to do. If you're at home campaigning, you can't be on the role fundraising for other candidates -- you can't be campaigning for other candidates. And let the party, let the big money people actually put their efforts behind the front-line races. We're going to look at the second tier and the third tier and we're going to try to expand the playing field. And I think we did that very, very effectively. Of course, that means we're going to lose most races.

If I wanted a great won-loss record, I would put my money behind Hillary Clinton, you know, Senate race in, you know, in 2006. I would put my money behind every single incumbent because incumbents get re-elected at a 99-percent rate. You don't win very many races if you're focusing on challengers. What we're trying to do isn't to say, 'Well, look how great Markos has a great won-loss record.' What we're trying to do is expand the playing field, put pressure on Republicans and show that there's a Democratic party in places that haven't seen a Democratic [candidate] in decades.

TAPPER: So of the 15, how many -- how many won?

MOULITSAS: There were 17 in 2004. We won two.

TAPPER: You won two. Who were the two?

MOULITSAS: Stephanie Herseth in South Dakota, Ben Chandler in Kentucky. And actually, we also were very involved in the primaries in Illinois with Beck and Barack Obama. So Barack Obama was actually the patron saint of Daily Kos in 2004. So, three then.

TAPPER: Three. But your point is, your win-loss record is not great, but that's not the point.